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en-usTechdirt. Stories filed under "priorities"https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/td-88x31.gifhttps://www.techdirt.com/Thu, 20 Nov 2014 09:24:05 PSTFrench Government Takes 172 Million Euros From Citizens To Pay Publisher For Access To Research Public Already Paid For OnceTim Cushinghttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141111/13425429109/french-government-takes-172-million-citizens-to-pay-publisher-access-to-research-public-already-paid-once.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141111/13425429109/french-government-takes-172-million-citizens-to-pay-publisher-access-to-research-public-already-paid-once.shtml
It's all about priorities. Those providing the valuable research will have to learn to do without because the publishers must be paid.

France may not have any money left for its universities but it does have money for academic publishers. While university presidents learn that their funding is to be reduced by EUR 400 million, the Ministry of Research has decided, under great secrecy, to pay EUR 172 million to the world leader in scientific publishing Elsevier.

If the name Elsevier rings a bell, it's because the academic publishing giant has dragged its own dubious reputation through the mud with alarming frequency over the past several years. It has charged for access to open-access documents, despite being repeatedly informed of this "oversight" in its purchasing system. At one point it had a division dedicated to cranking out fake medical journals for use by pharmaceutical companies to buttress iffy claims about medicinal effectiveness. It was also engaged in ghostwriting copy for these same companies in order to downplay disagreeable research findings. It has also routinely targeted researchers who have posted copies of their own work on personal sites or to freely-accessible university online libraries.

As the Open Knowledge Foundation points out, France is paying multiple times for the same documents -- documents created for "free" by university researchers who don't see a cent of Elsevier's profits.

The scientific publishing market is an unusual sector, those who create value are never remunerated. Instead, they often pay to see their work published. Authors do not receive any direct financial gain from their articles, and the peer review is conducted voluntarily. This enormous amount of work is indirectly funded by public money. Writing articles and participating in peer review are part of the expected activities of researchers, expected activities that lead to further research funding from the taxpayer.

So, in response to demands from Elsevier, France is cutting the financing that generates the research locked up by academic publishers and increasing its contributions to a company that enjoys a 30-40% profit margin on documents it is often paid (by researchers) to resell.

This published research was mainly financed by public funds. Therefore in the end, we will have paid to Elsevier twice: once to publish, a second time to read.

When the Open Access Foundation says "we," it means French citizens. And despite being double-dipped by their government, a large majority of French citizens will still have no access to the research locked up by Elsevier. Publicly-funded research resides behind the publisher's paywall, limited to certain people within the 476 institutions included in the agreement. While Elsevier did offer the French government a "discount" of nearly 16 million EUR, this price cut is due to the withdrawal of over 150 institutions from Elsevier's licensing scheme.

That's a lot of money being spent to benefit only a small percentage of French citizens. And, as the article points out, it's only one of several similar agreements with other academic publishers. These closed markets provide for constantly increasing prices, even as digital storage and distribution continue to decrease costs. And let's not forget the fact that those creating these works are also paying to have them included in academic publishers' libraries, often giving up control of their copyright for an extended period of time.

Sooner or later, the system will collapse under its own weight. Slashing funding to universities negatively affects the creation of the very documents Elsevier needs to sustain its position in the marketplace. You can't continue to rob one to pay for the other, at least not forever. Publisher reaction to declining participation has generally been to increase rates -- another unsustainable pattern. But until it all falls apart, publishers will continue to do all they can to separate the public from research it already paid for once… and erect a paywall to ensure they still can't access it even after paying for it again.

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]]>and-slashes-public-education-funding-on-top-of-ithttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20141111/13425429109Wed, 19 Mar 2014 07:30:00 PDTDespite Promises To Fight Mortgage Fraud, DOJ Basically Ignored It, Then Claimed Success With Faulty StatsMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140317/17483026608/mortgage-fraud-key-part-economic-recession-basically-ignored-fbi.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140317/17483026608/mortgage-fraud-key-part-economic-recession-basically-ignored-fbi.shtmlno longer law enforcement (as it was supposed to be), but rather "national security." Because fighting terrorism is hot. Putting bankers destroying the economy in jail? Not hot. As we noted at the time, the numbers showed that the FBI was putting a huge part of its budget towards "counterterrorism" (potentially doing much more to destroy your civil liberties than the NSA) and its efforts to take down white collar crime was dropping significantly.

“In cities across the country, mortgage fraud crimes have reached crisis proportions,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said at a mortgage fraud summit in Phoenix in 2010. “But we are fighting back.”

The inspector general’s report, however, shows that the F.B.I. considered mortgage fraud to be its lowest-ranked national criminal priority. In several large cities, including New York and Los Angeles, F.B.I. agents either ranked mortgage fraud as a low priority or did not rank it at all.

Oh, and even better, because of all the hype and talk about mortgage fraud, Congress allocated more budget specifically for that purpose, though it appears to have gone elsewhere.

And that's not all. The DOJ then pretended that it had been fighting mortgage fraud and put on a whole presentation about its success -- based on totally faulty numbers. Numbers that it was pretty sure were faulty -- and then took nearly a year to admit that their claims of success were based on bogus stats:

We further found that, despite receiving
significant additional funding from Congress to pursue mortgage fraud cases, the
FBI in adding new staff did not always use these new positions to exclusively
investigate mortgage fraud. Moreover, when we attempted to assess the
effectiveness of the Department’s efforts in pursuing mortgage fraud cases, we
found that DOJ could not provide readily verifiable data related to its criminal and
civil enforcement efforts. The DOJ’s release of significantly flawed information at a
highly publicized press conference in October 2012 regarding the purported success
of the FFETF’s and the DOJ’s recent mortgage fraud initiative reflects the lack of
accurate data maintained by the Department regarding its mortgage fraud efforts,
as well as the Department’s serious failure to adequately vet information that it was
presenting to the public. Only days after the press conference the Department had
serious concerns over the accuracy of the reported statistics, yet it was not until
August 2013 when the Department informed the public that the October 2012
reported statistics were indeed flawed. Moreover, during those 10 months, the
Department continued to issue press releases publicizing statistics it knew were
seriously flawed. We believe the Department should have been more forthright at a
much earlier date about this flawed information.

Somehow, none of this is making me feel any safer.

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]]>terrorism-is-hothttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20140317/17483026608Wed, 3 Jul 2013 09:00:41 PDTReveal Illegal Surveillance? Run For Your Life; Conduct Illegal Surveillance & Lie About It? No BiggieMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130702/16230323698/reveal-illegal-surveillance-run-your-life-conduct-illegal-surveilance-lie-about-it-no-biggie.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130702/16230323698/reveal-illegal-surveillance-run-your-life-conduct-illegal-surveilance-lie-about-it-no-biggie.shtmlillegal and unconstitutional surveillance efforts is finding that US pressure and various "technicalities" mean that his asylum requests are getting quickly rejected, leaving him with dwindling options. Meanwhile, James Clapper, who ran the actual program and then flat out lied to Congress about is, can apparently get away with a ridiculous, staged "apology" to Congress for "clearly erroneous" statements.

In a sane world, the person who exposed an illegal surveillance program would be celebrated and congratulated, while the guy who ran the program and lied to Congress about it would be the one worried about his future. Instead, Snowden is being hunted, while no one seems even remotely concerned that Clapper has admitted to not just perjuring himself, but also running a highly questionable surveillance program that to this day is continuing to collect data on millions of Americans and their communications. Something is really screwed up with our priorities.

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]]>our priorities are really screwed uphttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130702/16230323698Fri, 4 Nov 2011 18:39:00 PDTPress Goes Nuts Over Bieber Baby, But Ignores Bieber's Concerns With Regulating The InternetMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111104/13203516639/press-goes-nuts-over-bieber-baby-ignores-biebers-concerns-with-regulating-internet.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111104/13203516639/press-goes-nuts-over-bieber-baby-ignores-biebers-concerns-with-regulating-internet.shtmlseems pretty messed up that our news media is going absolutely nuts over the story of the potential "Bieber baby," but has all but ignored the story of how the lack of clarity in the proposed SOPA law might mean Justin Bieber would go to jail for his performances of other people's works on YouTube -- something Bieber himself has spoken out against. Let's take a look. A basic Google News search on "bieber baby" turns up... 3,770 news stories:

And then let's do a search on "bieber sopa." For that... we get... a grand total of 15 news stories (including one from Techdirt):

Which story is actually more important? The one in which the government makes massive regulatory changes to the internet that will create felons out of ordinary people? Or the story about a baby that a pop star may or may not have fathered?

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]]>priorities,-peoplehttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20111104/13203516639Tue, 22 Feb 2011 11:42:42 PSTWhy Is The MPAA's Top Priority 'Fighting Piracy' Rather Than Helping The Film Industry Thrive?Mike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110221/15024713194/why-is-mpaas-top-priority-fighting-piracy-rather-than-helping-film-industry-thrive.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110221/15024713194/why-is-mpaas-top-priority-fighting-piracy-rather-than-helping-film-industry-thrive.shtmlgone back on his promises and his principles to take the top lobbying job at the MPAA, but this recent article in Hillicon Valley, talking with interim MPAA boss Bob Pisano, is bizarre in that it shows how incredibly misguided the MPAA's entire strategy is. We've seen that the MPAA has an entire "content protection" staff, but doesn't appear to have a staff of folks dedicated to actually helping filmmakers to adapt and to succeed in the modern era. But it strikes me as ridiculously short-sighted that the MPAA admits that its number one priority is getting the government to "fight piracy."

Interim CEO and president Bob Pisano told Hillicon Valley earlier this month that the media's fixation on who would succeed former chairman Dan Flickman hadn't changed his organization's unwavering focus on its top priority, which is increasing the federal government's efforts to stop online film piracy.

And, yes, the amusing misspelling of Dan Glickman's name is in the original. But, more to the point, why is getting the government to fight piracy the MPAA's "top priority," when study after study has shown that piracy, alone, is not damaging the industry. It's the failure to compete and to come up with smarter business models that is causing trouble for filmmakers. Even if you got rid of piracy, it's not like it would suddenly drive people to start buying again. Perhaps the real problem is that Pisano (a lawyer, of course) is so clueless when it comes to business, he doesn't realize what business the movie industry is even in:

"I don't care how much you talk about it you can't compete with free," Pisano said.

And, that, right there, is why the MPAA should fire him and hire someone who actually understands business (which is not Chris Dodd). Of course, you can compete with free. Lots of businesses do it all the time and plenty of movie makers have successfully done it for years. Why would Pisano flat-out lie?

It's almost not worth mentioning that Pisano also talks up the importance of COICA and how happy he is that Homeland Security has been seizing domains in violation of the First Amendment and basic due process, even taking down tens of thousands of perfectly innocent sites. These are the people who run Hollywood now? Censorship-loving folks who can't understand basic business principles? No wonder they're so worried about failing. They have no clue what they're doing.

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]]>misplaced-prioritieshttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110221/15024713194Tue, 10 Aug 2010 10:26:00 PDTFBI Prioritizes Copyright Issues; Not So Concerned About Missing PersonsMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100809/17262010563.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100809/17262010563.shtmlmajor priority for the FBI, it appears that the FBI has stopped caring about things that seem a lot more important. Earlier this year, we noted that the FBI had stopped considering identity fraud as a priority. Now, a new report notes that another thing the FBI appears to not care much about are missing persons cases. Specifically, the FBI has consciously decided to give such cases lower priority in the FBI's laboratory, which is used to look at DNA evidence. This has created a massive backlog in missing persons cases. A new report from the Justice Department's Inspector General notes that this has serious consequences:

"Backlogs can also prevent the timely capture of criminals, prolong the incarceration of innocent people who could be exonerated by DNA evidence, and adversely affect families of missing persons waiting for positive identification of remains."

Perhaps I'm missing something, but doesn't it seem like missing persons cases and identity fraud are the sorts of things the FBI should be working on, as they're cases where individuals can be seriously harmed? Copyright cases are really just business model issues, where the only "harm" is caused by copyright holders refusal to adapt to a changing market. Isn't it time the FBI got its priorities straight?

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]]>say what now?https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100809/17262010563Mon, 17 Aug 2009 05:36:28 PDTIs The Federal Government The Most Interesting Tech Startup For 2009?Mike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090817/0133175896.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090817/0133175896.shtmlactually getting stuff done, with a focus on openness and data sharing. Chopra talked, repeatedly, about figuring out what could be done both short- and long-term, and never once struck me as someone looking to hoard power or focus on a partisan or political reason for doing things. It was never about positioning things to figure out how to increase his budget. In fact, many of the ideas he was discussing was looking at ways to just get stuff done now without any need for extra budget. Needless to say, this is not the sort of thing you hear regularly from folks involved in the government.

But, of course, talk is cheap (especially in politics). And, while Chopra (and Vivek Kundra, the government's CIO) both actually have a nice track record of accomplishing these sorts of goals in their past jobs, the proof is in what's actually getting done. We'd already mentioned at least one success story with the IT dashboard at USASpending.gov, but can it continue? I have to admit, a second thing that impressed me about Chopra was that, even with such a success, he didn't focus on it. The fact that he got together such a site in such a short period of time is impressive enough, and while he mentioned it in his talks, most of them were much more focused not on what he'd already done, but on what he was going to do -- and the plans all seemed quite achievable.

So I have to agree with Anil Dash, that one of the most interesting tech "startups" to watch this year is the federal government of the US. The tech projects that they're already coming out with are compelling and well done. As Anil notes:

What's remarkable about these sites is not merely that they exist; There had been some efforts to provide this kind of information in the past. Rather, what stands out is that they exhibit a lot of the traits of some of the best tech startups in Silicon Valley or New York City. Each site has remarkably consistent branding elements, leading to a predictable and trustworthy sense of place when you visit the sites. There is clear attention to design, both from the cosmetic elements of these pages, and from the thoughtfulness of the information architecture on each site. (The clear, focused promotional areas on each homepage feel just like the "Sign up now!" links on the site of most Web 2.0 companies.) And increasingly, these services are being accompanied by new APIs and data sources that can be used by others to build interesting applications.

That last point is perhaps most significant. We've seen the remarkable innovation that sprung up years ago around the API for services like Flickr, and that continues full-force today around apps like Twitter. But who could have predicted just a year or two ago that we might have something like Apps for America, the effort being led by the Sunlight Foundation, Google, O'Reilly Media and TechWeb to reward applications built around datasets provided by Data.gov. The tools that have already been built are fascinating. And, frankly, they're a lot more compelling than most of the sample apps that a typical startup can wring out of its community with a developer contest.

There's plenty going on in the administration that I disagree with and am troubled by -- but efforts on the tech side are something worth applauding, while also watching to see what the folks there can do in the next few years.

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]]>perhaps...https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20090817/0133175896Fri, 5 Jun 2009 17:11:00 PDTNational CTO's Plans Sound Pretty Good... Let's Hope They Don't Get Bogged Down In PoliticsMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090605/0824185140.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090605/0824185140.shtmllaid out his basic priorities, and they definitely sound like steps in the right direction:

Economic growth through innovation

Addressing presidential priorities through innovation platforms

Building the next-generation digital infrastructure

Fostering a culture of open and innovative government

While those bullet points may sound a little vague, they certainly are the key things he should be focused on, and the rest of the article details some of the details of where he may be heading on all of those points, and it suggests that he's certainly going beyond the soundbite style thoughts found all too commonly in political circles these days. For example, when most politicians talk about economic growth through innovation, they usually mean just dumping more money into research programs or increasing the number of patents. But, as we've all seen, those don't necessarily serve as an accurate proxy for real innovation. Instead, Chopra wants to focus on looking at actual data about how products are getting to market:

Rather than purely thinking about basic research, he said, the government should focus on investing in technologies that can be developed. A first step is to find ways to actually measure how much research is being commercialized.

"There is an implicit assumption that R.&D. investment will lead to job growth and economic success," he said. "The measurement question will lead us to think about, how do we begin to assess the outcomes."

It's great to see that he's skeptical of the common wisdom that R&D automatically leads to economic growth, but wants to dig deeper into the data to see what the numbers really mean. He's also hoping to learn from how different universities lead to commercialization:

Mr. Chopra noted that among universities, there is a wide range in how effective they are in commercializing the work of their laboratories. He wants to take the practices used by the most commercial of universities and spread them to other research facilities.

Again, this is good news. Many people falsely assume that things like the Bayh-Dole Act, which pushed universities to patent their research to drive commercialization was a good thing. But there's a growing amount of research suggesting that Bayh-Dole has actually harmed research and the ability to commercialize products. Hopefully, the data that Chopra is looking at takes that into account. Bayh-Dole caused many universities to set up "tech transfer" offices, but the vast majority of them are losing money -- in part because they've focused on the patents rather than the actual steps to innovation. The universities that have focused on enabling innovation rather than just collecting and licensing the most patents, have had the most success.

Hopefully, there is where Chopra will lead the government... but, as always, until we see it in action, it's worth being skeptical and watching closely. At this point, though, it's nice to see that he actually seems to be looking in the right direction.

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]]>good-signshttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20090605/0824185140Tue, 27 May 2008 23:33:00 PDTThe Internet Isn't 'Critical Infrastructure'Timothy Leehttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080522/1905471205.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080522/1905471205.shtmlA new report (PDF, via Slashdot), by a security analyst named Gadi Evron, analyzes the recent Estonian "cyber-attacks" and makes recommendations about how to deal with such attacks in the future. While it makes some good suggestions, it also rather dramatically overstates the nature of the threat. For example: "The Estonian authorities need to revise some of their former preconceptions and define the Internet as critical infrastructure, equally strategic to national security as its electricity grid and water supply." This is rather silly. If the water supply is cut off, people can die of thirst or sanitation problems. If the electricity grid fails, it can lead to the death of old people dependent on their air conditioners or medical devices. If the Internet fails, it's a big headache for a lot of people, but it's unlikely to be a life-threatening emergency.

The report points out that some mission-critical activities, including voting and banking, are carried out via the Internet in some places. But to the extent that that's true, the lesson of the Estonian attacks isn't that the Internet is "critical infrastructure" on par with electricity and water, but that it's stupid to build "critical infrastructure" on top of the public Internet. There's a reason that banks maintain dedicated infrastructure for financial transactions, that the power grid has a dedicated communications infrastructure, and that computer security experts are all but unanimous that Internet voting is a bad idea. The Internet's architecture is optimized to be cheap and ubiquitous; such a network is never going to be perfectly secure or reliable. There are too many botnets, incompetent administrators, and other problems on the Internet. And so transactions that absolutely have to be done correctly and on time need to be done on a dedicated network, or at least the people doing them need to have a backup plan in case the Internet has problems.

But the report takes the opposite approach, essentially concluding that because people do important things on the Internet, the Internet needs to be treated as an essential national security asset. This reaches absurd lengths when Evron writes that because attacks often originate from botnets consisting of compromised personal computers, "personal computers need to be reprioritized and considered as critical infrastructure." He doesn't discuss what that means in any detail -- maybe they can post soldiers with automatic weapons outside peoples' home offices. Evron concedes that "the attacks in Estonia did not hurt critical infrastructure, energy, and transportation," but nevertheless insists that "an Internet-staged attack on energy could easily disrupt entire supply and distribution chains, prompting severe shortages." He never elaborates on how that would work, but if he's right, the solution is to do a better job of separating critical infrastructure from the public Internet.

Wide-scale cyber-vandalism is a real problem, and it's good to be talking about ways to respond to it more effectively. But we need to keep a sense of perspective. Launching a distributed denial-of-service attack -- even a really big one -- is nothing like conventional warfare or a terrorist attack. Terrorism and warfare lead to massive loss of life and destruction of property. Internet vandalism rarely involves more than a few hours' inconvenience and lost productivity. That's certainly something we should try to prevent, but we shouldn't blow it out of proportion.